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Reading Kathryn Para’s debut novel, Lucky, is like stepping through the screen of a TV newscast about the Middle East. In particular, about stepping beyond the images that have become so familiar to us by now: the urgent sounding journalist reporting from a war zone; the sporadic pop of rifle fire heard nearby; clips of soldiers, mere boys, edging along bombed out buildings; terrified women and children scurrying across deserted town squares.

But what is it like to be that journalist in the midst of so much devastation? What happens after their pictures have been taken and their sound bites filed? And what drives them to risk their lives in this way; how does the experience affect them, emotionally, morally? Some, we know, have been killed while covering wars; others have been captured and tortured, held for ransom. What is it like for the “lucky” ones who return home?

Kathryn Para’s astonishing novel — astonishing in its scope and depth, astonishing as a first novel — is the winner of Mother Tongue Publishing’s 2nd “Search for the Great BC Novel,” and it goes a long way to answering these questions.

The story concerns Ani Lund, a 35-year-old photojournalist working freelance in the Middle East, her harrowing experiences there, and her just as harrowing bout with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder upon returning home.

Lucky, then, is the story of Ani’s season in hell.

Written in alternating chapters employing first and third person narratives, the focus of the novel shifts and roams like a camera lens.

It’s wide-angled and detached for the sections of Ani in the Middle East — Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, circa 2002-04. And it’s macro, close-up, for the first person sections of Ani not recovering well in Vancouver, 2005-06. Vancouver here is seen as a kind of banal heaven when set alongside the everyday horror of war.

As Ani says of her psychiatrist, the sharply drawn Dorothy Chin who could be a stand-in for the “obscenity of Western affluence” and comfortable remove: “I wonder if she has any f***ing idea what the world is really like.”

Ani’s method of coping with PTSD and the ceaseless nightmares, day-time visions, insomnia, shakes, and flashbacks is to “use the V-drug, vodka, to fantastic effect.” Para portrays her as perceptive, courageous, and warm-hearted, but also as a drunk, prone to self-pity, riddled with guilt, angry, cynical, hard-edged, vulnerable, and, consequently, very human.

Without spoiling the outcome of the novel, suffice to say that Ani’s memory of the horror she encountered is fragmented. Her capture in Fallujah by Iraqi resistance fighters along with her friends, Alex, a Danish journalist and former lover, and Viva, who acts as her interpreter and who has her own agenda of revenge, is remembered haltingly. Yet, by novel’s end, something of a wholeness of vision emerges: “What matters is that I not allow their brutal nature to destroy my humanity.”

Getting the story out is what has driven Ani: “Maybe this time she has taken the photograph that will end the war.” She wants what every good journalist wants, “a great story, meaning conflict and lots of secrets to expose.”

She’s addicted to the adrenalin rush of chasing a lead, being in danger, having to use her wits to survive, and to take photographs that “push the buttons at the editorial desk.”

Yet, back in Vancouver, she is loathe to publish the pictures she has taken of the events leading up to and including her capture, loathe to revisit the violence, upheaval, shock that not only underscores the lives of the Middle East civilian population, but now of her own life, as well.

Para’s depictions of the war scenes in Lucky are stunning, her understanding of the political forces at play, astute; these sections ring with a profound authenticity. Yet it’s the heartbreaking, personal account of Ani that is so enlightening. We’re reading of a woman who is angry about being a “woman in a man’s mythology.”

M.A.C. Farrant’s forthcoming book, The World Afloat, will appear from Talonbooks in Spring, 2014.

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